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Tuesday, December 2, 2008

Sex Work Equals Slavery - Right?

Here's a chilling reminder of the degree to which radfem rhetoric has penetrated MSM analysis and government policy-making when it comes to sex work. This gem from today's Huffpo, written by Ambassador Swanee Hunt and "anti-trafficking activist" Lina Sidrys Nealon, is supposed to be about the modern-day slave trade. But you won't have to read very far down to find the real agenda behind it, along with the cooked statistics and boilerplate distortions familiar to anyone who has had the misfortune of reading from Melissa Farley's playbook:

"December 2 is International Day for the Abolition of Slavery. Don't be deceived. This is no celebration commemorating the end of a slave trade. The UN designated this day to remind us that slavery remains part of our 21st Century lives.

Slavery is more prevalent today than at any point in history. Free the Slaves estimates that 27 million people are trapped in debt bondage, domestic servitude, hard labor, or the sex trade for little to no pay beyond subsistence.

Of the 800,000 people annually trafficked across international borders, roughly 70% are sold into the sex industry. Inside the US alone, at least 300,000 children and adolescents fall prey every year, and their average age is thirteen. They're lured from their homes by Internet, or as runaways they're picked up within a day by trawling pimps, with promises of jobs, security, and love. Instead, the victims are treated as commodities and forced into a life in which many experience battering, degradation, rape, captivity, and - no wonder - extreme depression.

The sex industry operates by standard supply and demand dynamics. But it's the distribution system, interstate trafficking, that has caught the attention of policy makers. In this case, instead of drugs, criminals are trading in "reusable" bodies - and they're raking in the profits.

Demand by johns. Distribution by traffickers and pimps.

Supply: human beings.

For all we may exalt in rescuing children from brothels, there's a growing recognition within the US and internationally that sex trafficking won't end until demand does. US-based organizations such as the Chicago Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation and the Coalition Against Trafficking of Women are raising public awareness and advocating for policies geared toward the purchasers. The fearless Mayor of Atlanta, Shirley Franklin, has launched the "No Tolerance Campaign" sending the message that predators aren't welcome in her city. "Dear John, It's over." her billboards announce.

Yet despite these admirable efforts, compared to several European nations, the US is far behind the curve in fighting demand. We traveled to Stockholm and Oslo to meet with government officials, researchers, members of parliament, police, and even Queen Silvia to examine how Sweden has forged the way. After years of parliamentary debate, in 1999 Swedes passed the Sex Purchase Law, which criminalized buying and decriminalized selling sex. This placed the emphasis on the buyers, while allowing women to seek help without being fined or deported. In five years, the number of prostituted women in Sweden dropped 40%. Today, the government estimates that less than 400 women are trafficked into the country, while in neighboring Finland it's 17,000.

The law and its accompanying measures are credited with shifting the entire social mindset to one where buying another human being is simply unacceptable. Today, Swedes consider prostitution inherently violent and harmful to society: Even when it's seemingly consensual, they say, the act is built on and reinforces an oppressive power imbalance between the user and the used. Although there's a very small percentage of women who freely choose to sell their bodies, they are the well-publicized exceptions. Swedes don't build public policy around protecting them when the damage to the large majority is so great. We were told that when young men from around the world were asked in a survey whether they had or would be willing to buy sex, only 11 percent of the Swedes said "yes," compared to 60 percent of Dutch men.

Sweden has inspired a trend. Norway recently made it illegal for its citizens to purchase any sex acts anywhere in the world. And Britain's Home Office just introduced a new law making it an offence to pay for sex with somebody who is "controlled for another person's gain," including pimps, traffickers, and drug dealers who force addicts to "turn tricks" to repay them. (Interestingly, a plea of ignorance is no defense for men facing charges; that's powerful, since 70% of the 88,000 prostituted women in England and Wales are under the control of pimps and traffickers, and the buyer won't have a way to determine if his prospect is among them.) Laws based on the Swedish model are being considered in Israel, India, and even the Netherlands, where a third of the infamous red light district brothels were shut down this year due to the illicit trafficking lurking within the shadows of the legal sex industry.

The US needs to get up to speed with the global abolitionist movement's focus on demand. With the election of our first African-American president, many find themselves reflecting on how far we've come as a nation: from a time when men, women, and children were kidnapped, tethered, and shipped to this country for our use and abuse. We're infuriated over the action, or inaction, of those who came before us, who lived in denial of the suffering around them. In a hundred years, what will our children's children say about us?

Swanee Hunt is the Eleanor Roosevelt Lecturer in Public Policy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. Lina Sidrys Nealon is manager of the Hunt Alternatives Fund Modern-Day Slavery Project."

First of all, let's have a look at this statement:

"Of the 800,000 people annually trafficked across international borders, roughly 70% are sold into the sex industry."

Not only is it unsourced, it's preposterous on the face of it. How could such a statistic be established when the illegal trade in all forms of forced labor is carried on in secret, mostly in parts of the world where officials look the other way and reliable field research is virtually impossible to conduct due to the obstruction of corrupt governments and the inaccessible remoteness of the border areas in the developing world where much of this trade is carried on? Did clipboard-bearing statisticians track down the militias that conscript child soldiers in much of Africa? Did they have access to the sweatshops of China and Indonesia? To the domestic labor pools of the oil-rich Gulf States? Doubtful.

A little poking around on the Web reveals that this questionable assertion comes from the U.S. State Department. You know, the one that's been run by the Bush administration over the past eight years. Yep, that's the same one that denies HIV prevention funding to countries that don't criminalize sex work or sign the requisite pledge to do so.

Yeah, right, the same State Department that sent Colin Powell to lie to the U.N. about Saddam's WMD. I'm sure their intelligence is much more accurate when it comes to a worldwide phenomenon of enormous complexity carried on largely in places where our government has little or no human intelligence capabilities.

But starting from this completely unsupported assertion, the call to arms grows incessantly more shrill ... and familiar:

"For all we may exalt in rescuing children from brothels, there's a growing recognition within the US and internationally that sex trafficking won't end until demand does. US-based organizations such as the Chicago Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation and the Coalition Against Trafficking of Women are raising public awareness and advocating for policies geared toward the purchasers."

Wait a minute. Let's back up here and have a closer look at the "heroic" organizations lionized for combatting this evil trade in women's bodies. A quick look at the roster of groups supporting Chicago Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation reveals names we've come to know all too well, including Captive Daughters, Stop Porn Culture, Open Lens Media (producers of TPoP), Anti-porn Activist Network (whose blogroll is a veritable Who's Who of radfem cranks like Diana Russell), Prostitution Research and Education (Bingo! Melissa Farley's home base, and doubtless the source for much of the statistical bullshit in this piece), One Angry Girl ... you get the picture.

Now let's have a look at the Coalition Against Trafficking of Women. Hmm. Seems like the third link down on their homepage goes to the No On Prop K Web site, where we again encounter such APRF notables as Ms. Farley, Catherine MacKinnon, Robin Morgan, Norma Hotaling and, once again, our favorite whack-job, Diana Russell. Right below the anit-Prop K header, we find a call to pressure HBO into dropping its series Cathouse for "normalizing the demand for prostitution." Yes, well, we're sure that HBO's adult programming is largely responsible for the seizure of young African girls to serve as sex slaves for roving bands of armed thugs.

Alrighty then, now that we've seen who the author's friends are, we can pretty much predict what they have to say about the likes of us:

"Although there's a very small percentage of women who freely choose to sell their bodies, they are the well-publicized exceptions."

Well, so much for Ren and Nina and all the other self-identified sex workers who post here and elsewhere. They hardly rate a single sentence, and it's not surprisingly buried in the middle of an encomium to the glories of "the Swedish solution." We're informed, with a nearly audible sniff that: "Swedes don't build public policy around protecting them (the very small percentage freely "selling" their bodies, that is) when the damage to the large majority is so great."

And I do love the use of the term "freely sell their bodies." Last time I checked, most of the sex workers I know still had their bodies, but I guess the verb "sell" has a different meaning to these authors. They also use the term "prostituted women" to describe all sex workers indiscriminately, and quickly dispatch arguments about consent thus: "Today, Swedes consider prostitution inherently violent and harmful to society: Even when it's seemingly consensual, they say, the act is built on and reinforces an oppressive power imbalance between the user and the used." Well Go Swedes! Except for Swedish sex workers, that is, especially those who have spoken out repeatedly against the re-criminalization of prostitution there for making their jobs more dangerous and difficult and further stigmatizing them in society, thus making it even harder for those wishing to exit sex work.

Finally, the authors unfurl their true colors in the last graph: "The US needs to get up to speed with the global abolitionist movement's focus on demand." They then go on, rather ominously, to invoke our new African-American president by way of equating their cause with that of anti-slavery abolitionism in the antebellum South. We can only wonder with whom this false parallel is intended to resonate. American liberals who have previously supported things like Prop K, First Amendment rights for pornography and harm reduction strategies for active sex workers perhaps?

Let me be absolutely clear here, as the authors of this disingenuous piece of agitprop are not. Slavery in any form is an abomination. It can and must be actively opposed by every human being who presumes to consider him or herself civilized. I make no attempt to minimize the breadth of this criminal trade in the modern world. It's harder to find countries where it doesn't exist than those in which it flourishes. This is nothing short of a global disgrace.

But when addressing the horror of modern day slavery, it's important to recognize that most involves common labor and not sex work. According to the U.N.'s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, there are over 27,000,000 slave laborers scattered around the globe at this moment. The vast majority of them are subject to forced labor, not forced sex.

And where, according to the U.N., is slavery most common? The worst offenders are not, as the authors of this article would have you believe, "the pimps and pornographers" of the industrialized West. Leading the list of infamy when it comes to slavery are The Sudan, Niger, The United Arab Emirates, Nepal, Pakistan, Indonesia and India. In Asia, slaves weave rugs and quarry stone. In Africa, over 100,000 children have been impressed into military service and are actively engaged in armed conflict. Slave laborers also cut sugar cane in Haiti and The Dominican Republic. Slaves, particularly children, are most frequently used as a cheap source of manual labor.

This is not to deny the existence of sexual slavery or sex trafficking. These things do exist and are despicable as well as criminal. They are also a much smaller component of the totality of slavery in the world than the sex work opponents who have seized the vanguard on this issue want us to believe. Their cause is only incidentally the abolition of slavery in general. They are sex work abolitionists. They don't care whether or not the sex workers themselves are, in fact, voluntary, sometimes migratory, participants in an industry that has many injustices and inequities but that does not, in the overwhelming number of individual instances, constitute slavery.

It is a heinous distortion to minimize the real atrocity of slavery as it exists around the world today by conflating it with consensual sex work as these authors shamelessly do, with barely a nod to the suffering millions whose involuntary servitude doesn't involve sex.

That such dishonest partisanship may influence government policy here and abroad ought rightly to concern everyone with an interest in freedom, including those like myself who ardently oppose slavery in all its forms, not just those that suit a narrow political agenda.

11 comments:

@Ernest: "Their cause is only incidentally the abolition of slavery in general. They are sex work abolitionists. They don't care whether or not the sex workers themselves are, in fact, voluntary, sometimes migratory, participants in an industry that has many injustices and inequities but that does not, in the overwhelming number of individual instances, constitute slavery.

It is a heinous distortion to minimize the real atrocity of slavery as it exists around the world today by conflating it with consensual sex work as these authors shamelessly do, with barely a nod to the suffering millions whose involuntary servitude doesn't involve sex."

And this continues to be my problem with the abolitionists. They have this hatred of sex work and sex workers that overrides any true concern for the actual horror of forced labor. Conflating sex work and sex slavery is like conflating farming and slaves working a plantation. That they don't want to make the distinction means they don't want to rescue any actual victims, because people who do want to help others make sure that ones who NEED it get it. And only them.

"In Asia, slaves weave rugs and quarry stone. In Africa, over 100,000 children have been impressed into military service and are actively engaged in armed conflict. Slave laborers also cut sugar cane in Haiti and The Dominican Republic. Slaves, particularly children, are most frequently used as a cheap source of manual labor."

Exactly and all situations that, with the exception of the child soldiers, are hidden from view. How many people go to a sugar cane plantation anywhere? A quarry? Those are ideal places for traffickers to put people...less likely to be noticed.

Hi, I am from England and we are having to fight these anti prostitution women as well. I won't called them feminists, because there are many public feminists don't view prostitution in that way.

In the quote in your article about the UK and Sweden 'And Britain's Home Office just introduced a new law making it an offence to pay for sex with somebody who is "controlled for another person's gain," including pimps, traffickers, and drug dealers who force addicts to "turn tricks" to repay them. (Interestingly, a plea of ignorance is no defence for men facing charges; that's powerful, since 70% of the 88,000 prostituted women in England and Wales are under the control of pimps and traffickers, and the buyer won't have a way to determine if his prospect is among them.)'

I want to make it clear, this is a PROPOSED law, and even if became law in that form it won't be on the statute books for a year.

Today we hear (Queens speach) if this legislation is going before the parliament. Its gone awful quiet at the moment, and there has been much pressure from the GMB trades union to drop the legislation (They sponser 120 Labour MPs). 80% of the press articles were against the legislation, and not a word about it has been mentioned as a candidate for inclusion in the Queens speach.

At last most of the press have started questioning the figures quoted by our government. The high profile police operations which raided many brothels finding very few of the supposed 4000 trafficked women in the UK.

Also you have to question the law on control. By definition all women who work for an agency or brothel are controlled. That is the UK law. They may quite willing work, and have someone get them clients, but they are controlled.

Even if the law were to be introduced it will be severely diluted by the the house of lords. The house of Lords has has some real success to fending off some real incursions into our civil liberties.

Exactly. I had that very discussion with a hissingly angry anti-porn activist during a forum at UCLA recently. She refused to believe that there were no trafficked women working in porn in L.A. In fact, it would be impossible to conceal their status on a set full of people who work on other sets every day in the lawful business of making X-rated video here.

Even she was confounded when I asked her why any producer, no matter how stupid or greedy, would take such an obvious risk when there was a surplus of available talent working legally. She stammered out something about it being cheaper to use forced labor, but that makes no sense either.

The theoretical trafficker would still have to be paid and saving a couple of hundred bucks against the downside risk of about a million years in jail with an existing video tape as the proof to put the producer there if anyone leaked is math even the dumbest and most venal pornographer can do easily enough.

Not to mention that fact that sets are supervised by everyone from company owners to fire marshals to cops to permit inspectors, who literally cruise the streets of The Valley looking for suspicious concentrations of cars and vans that might be non-permitted shoot locations.

Now on the other hand, down in suburban Orange County, a number of illegal sweatshops using immigrant labor kept indoors under lock and key and beaten instead of paid have been busted and there are undoubtedly dozens if not hundreds of others. Under no regulation or control whatsoever, these places are only exposed when someone escapes or when a neighbor gets suspicious and calls the authorities. These criminal enterprises make the news for a day or so, but the stories are merely horrific without being sexy so they soon fade away.

There is slavery in America, but it's in places far less visible than porn sets. As you say, these self-styled "abolitionists" have merely latched onto trafficking, as they have child pornography, as a means of enlisting well-meaning dupes in their vendetta against all sexual commerce, which Gail Dines herself has vowed on national television to "destroy completely."

And to Maglor,

Welcome! And your points are all well-taken. One of the many dubious elements in the article was the depiction of Europe, including the U.K., as wholeheartedly endorsing the authors' entire platform without dissent. That is far from the case.

Clearly, some of their ideas have found a foothold in some parts of the E.U., but having spent a good deal of time over there, I seriously doubt that European societies have any real intention of abolishing all forms of the sex trade, or will even go very far toward implementing policies aimed at doing so.

Overall, I find European attitudes about sex work more pragmatic and open minded than those prevailing here, and I find it hard to picture the huge changes in social cultures reflected in the never-attributed statistics these writers toss around.

In the U.K. in the rest of Europe and here as well, I'm quite certain sex work will still be around long after the current wave of hysteria over it subsides.

Does anyone think that maybe making social security benefits available to these people, and making sure that said benefits are significantly above "subsistence", might be a possible solution to the problem?

(Sorry to bring my socialist-type thinking to the issue, but hey...! ;-) )

In my research. I am going to be open about this I am a John. Most British women I see are there to make money for themselves. Obvious.

Some are well educated, been to university, one I know is a part time University lecturer, another has a masters in law. The money as social security would have to be alot to temp them from prostitution.

One escort I have never met but talked to a bit, confided that she used to have alot of rich people buy her expensive meals, and take her to bed. She was working in the airlines. But at the end of the day she said she did not have money to pay the gas bill. So she took up escorting, and instead received the £200.

A women I only saw today works because of money, has a child. She mixes escorting with other sex work on the TV. She said she would rather do that work,then go on social services.

Serveral others whom I do websites for, are well educated, some make alot, some aim for the expensive client and the life style choice.

That type of prostitute, and there are alot of them around, do enjoy what they do, and generally are pretty safe in their work. None of them have been attacked by clients or are controlled.

They all also pay taxes.

They are all liberated.

I do though know others where they are lower in the pecking order. Some who did not know you could work for yourself, some who are pretty disorganised. One I know will spend what ever she gets, and will never save any money. I am not sure how raising social benefit would help her, (probably she already receives them).

But then in support of social benefits, it is considered by the ECP (English Collective of prostitutes) (and I have heard this form several madams as well), women work in prostitution because they need the money. Social security is not enough, and working in McDonalds or a supermarket does not pay enough to look after their children. Generally the father has left, and out Government(British) agencies is unable to get any money from them for child support.

So prostitution is more rewarding then other forms of work.

Remove the poverty from these families and you will remove them from prostitution.

Same with students. With large student loans, some women instead of working their way through uni, now prostitute through uni. The pay is better, and working hours less, then a restaurant or shop.

On the question of trafficking, there are trafficked women, but how many. Our anti's will say there are alot. One thing about the UK is a magnet for many foreign workers. It is a preferred destination for the East European, mainly because we speak English I believe. Also we are alot less racist then the French and germans .

It should be no surprise that the country would be a destination for Europeans wanting to work. I do wonder how many though are now going back, with the weakening of the pound against most other European currencies. definitely many polish workers have left. No one knows how many Polish prostitutes have left though.

Of course being a sex capital does bring in the nasty element, and traffickers are always being caught. But the anti's feed us with huge numbers who are trafficked and abused, while academic research done by many of the UK universities find the problem is grossly exaggerated. This being backed up by the failure of the British police to find many trafficked in a cross country campaign which targeted premises thought to be using trafficked women.

The same Government is removing funding and closing the one dedicated department in the police who actively pursued traffickers.

First I'd like to commend you for owning being a client. If there is a group more maligned than sex workers it would have to be those who patronize them.

Certainly, some are every bit as bad as they're commonly portrayed, but most are regular blokes who mean no harm and do none. As one sex worker told me: "about a third of my clients are guys I might consider dating if I were single."

Clients can and do become helpful friends to sex workers, doing things like helping them set up Web sites or get assistance in furthering their educations. They're not all sadistic monsters whose main motivation is to gain "access" to "expendable prostituted women to whom they can do whatever they want."

And it's useful to make the distinction, as you have, between sex workers who travel in search of better opportunities and those who are shipped from one place to another against their will. The latter certainly do exist, and the failure of law enforcement to find more of them may not be entirely indicative of how numerous they are. Official indifference, corruption and the ugly ingenuity of traffickers may also account for some measure of underreporting.

But there's no doubt that most sex workers cross borders on their own over things like currency shifts or larger client bases created by booming local industries employing large numbers of single men. This has often been true in U.S. history. During the westward expansion, sex workers followed miners and settlers, who many ended up marrying. In the city where I grew up, much of The Social Register consisted of the descendants of such unions.

Finally, I agree with you completely on the lack of zeal with which vice laws, however passionately enacted, are actually enforced. Faced with the choice between chasing sex workers or investing limited resources into the pursuit of violent criminals, most law enforcement officials adopt a pragmatic approach.

One of the may ugly byproducts of anti-vice campaigns is the cynicism they breed. As we see in the failed War On Drugs here, cops weary of chasing around non-violent drug offenders will often overlook drug-related violence. Similarly, vice enforcers tired of playing the cat-and-mouse game of hassling street walkers to placate business operators, will avert their eyes from the sex-work-related violence.

There are criminal problems and there are social issues. Though these things may sometimes overlap, no society can claim maturity until it's figured out which is which overall.

Very good comments and a great original post. I have nothing to add with regard to what has already been said, but I do have to take a minute to vent one of my personal pet peeves that no one else has discussed.

The article makes the same false assumption that the MSM has been spouting for the last year or so---that underage prostitution results solely from a demand for sex with children. To be sure, there are certainly examples of that, and the media often reports on outfits in Mexico and Thailand that specialize in providing child victims for predators traveling abroad.

I suspect, however, that the vast majority of patrons of underage prostitutes in the U.S. are not pedophiles and don't even know that they are having sex with someone who is underage. I think that the reality is that most teenagers who end up working as prostitutes in this country do so because they are more vulnerable to exploitation because of their inexperience and lack of legal status and they are desperate for food, shelter, and safety. Because of their increased vulnerability it is easier to force them into a criminalized profession than someone who is 19 or 20.

I have never seen any evidence that significant numbers of underaged prostitutes in the U.S. are holding themselves out or being advertised as victims for pedophiles. To the contrary, every news story that I've seen on the subject suggests that they are being dressed up and groomed to act older than their actual age, not their actual age or younger.

Of course, this fundamental fallacy in reasoning is not accidental. It serves to disguise the only workable solution to reduce the demand for underage prostitution---make prostitution by adults legal and safe. Then, adults who (for whatever reason) are willing to voluntarily make their living as sex workers can make that choice without having to fear for their lives and freedom and can provide services to those who are seeking to pay for sex. Then there won't be any need to force teenagers into pretending to be adults to serve the market.

If her role is restricted to getting convictions on war criminals who use rape as weapon against enemy populations, then its a good use for her talents. I fear, however, that she'll be using this to pursue her larger agenda, though.

Much as I'd love to believe that Professor Mackinnon will devote her seemingly inexhaustible energies to the prosecution of gender-related war crimes, such as the mass rapes perpetrated in Darfur, I fully expect she'll use whatever influence she has on the ICC to divert its resources to the suppression of sex work under the rubric of combatting "international sex trafficking."

While I don't doubt her appointment was a CYA maneuver on the part of Moreno-Ocampo, it still points disturbingly to the growing influence of MacKinnon's ideas at the highest levels of policy making, definitely in Europe and possibly over here.

Like so many Second Wavers, she may see her long period in the political wilderness as drawing to a close at last and new opportunities push a complacent and divided opposition aside.

It would be very unwise for our side to underestimate the havoc a revivified neo-con feminist movement of the sort whose thinking is so clearly evident in the original piece from which this thread devolves could inflict.

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Why yes, this blog is dedicated to pro-porn activism! With the belief that pornography falls under the auspices free speech and expression, and is legitimate entertainment for consenting adults, if made for and by consenting adults. One, as a consenting adult, has the right to make and view pornography as they choose.